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Facebook, man. Unbelievable. Second-most-visited website in the world. Frequented monthly by one-sixth of the Earth’s population. Primary source of news for half of the United States’ young people.

So vast and powerful is Facebook that it didn’t seem implausible when the rumors began: Facebook was about to introduce its own cellphone. Look on our works, Apple and Google, and despair!

The rumors were wrong. The new “Facebook phone” isn’t a phone. Instead, it’s a set of apps for phones running the Android operating system. You can download them from the Google app store onto certain phones from HTC and Samsung. More Android models will be compatible in the coming months, Facebook says. These apps also come preinstalled on the new HTC First, which costs $100 with a two-year AT&T contract.

This software suite, called Home, replaces the standard home and lock screens of the phone. In their places, what you see is a slowly scrolling parade of full-screen photos from your Facebook news feed. Text-only posts appear, too, using your friend’s primary profile picture (cover photo) as the photographic background.

The company says that at the moment, the Cover Feed — this parade of images on your lock and home screens — represents only about 80 percent of what you would see on the actual Facebook website.

What’s missing? Video posts and ads. Both, Facebook says, are coming soon. Yes, you read that right: The latest billboard for advertising is your own cellphone’s home screen. Are you ready for this?

Facebook points out that this sort of newsfeed screen saver is an excellent time-killer when you’re standing in line or waiting for someone. At the same time, the Home software replaces the home and lock screens that Google or your phone maker designed. Unfortunately, you lose some good features in the process.

For example, for most people, the entire purpose of a home screen is displaying app icons. But there are no icons on Facebook’s Home screens; Facebook thinks you’d rather use that space for reading Facebook updates.

The only icon that appears is your own profile photo. You can drag it to the left to open the Facebook messaging app, to the right to open the last open app — or upward to open a grid of app icons on a gray background. Ah, here are the apps. But it’s awfully sparse; where are the rest?

They’re on a screen off to the left. Swipe your finger to see, on a black background, the usual Android “all apps” screen. From here, you can hold your finger down on a particular app’s icon to install it onto the gray-background launcher screen, which can have multiple pages.

If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. In removing the app-launching function from the Home screen, Facebook has wound up having to reinvent the way you open programs on your phone, and the result feels like a hack. The black-background screen to the left lists all of your apps and scrolls vertically; the nearly identical gray-background screen lists only your favorites and scrolls horizontally. Got it?

Everything in Home is attractive, smooth and quick. At the same time, there’s something vaguely incoherent about the whole operation.

It’s not a phone, not an operating system, not even an app, really. Instead, it’s Facebook’s commandeering of the whole Android home-base design.

Is this going to be a new thing, replacing your home screen with a favorite company’s custom version? Will there be a Twitter home screen, a Pepsi home screen, a Justin Bieber home screen?

The Facebook apps for both iPhone and Android are outstanding. They’re full-featured, beautifully designed, extremely popular. What does Home add, really? Yes, the ability to see incoming posts on your home screen; you save one tap. But is it worth losing widgets, wallpaper, app folders and the Android status bar in the process?

What’s Facebook up to? Is Home part of some elaborate, sneaky, long-term, sideways plot to stab Google in the back and take over the world?

Or is it just a kind of weird, nebulous programming experiment that doesn’t entirely succeed?